LOST VEGAS: The Secret Reason for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Visit

Posted on: October 4, 2024, 09:00h. 

Last updated on: October 23, 2024, 10:46h.

Corey Levitan Read More

Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.

Las Vegas was a very different place when 42-year-old John F. Kennedy paid a visit in early February 1960. The Chicago mob still ran most of the casinos and Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack — who filmed “Ocean’s 11” by day and headlined the Sands at night — were chummy with all the bosses.

Kennedy wasn’t blind to any of this. This was his third trip to Sin City. In 1954 and 1956, he was the guest of Wilbur Clark at his villa on the Desert Inn golf course. Clark was the front man for the real owners of that casino hotel, Moe Dalitz and the Cleveland syndicate.

Mob-connected casino owners had contributed funds to Kennedy’s presidential campaign and his father, former bootlegger Joseph Kennedy, is alleged to have struck a deal with Chicago boss Sam Giancana to secure votes for his son.

But schmoozing with Sinatra and organized crime bosses was not why JFK had come to Vegas after campaigning, without his wife, in New Mexico.

“He was at the Sands to get laid,” Ed Walters told Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Norm Clarke in 2013. Walters, a former mob associate, worked as a casino manager and pit boss for the Sands Hotel and Casino at the time.

“Kennedy had heard that all the big CEOs came in here under assumed names to have a good time,” Walters said. “We were very discreet here.”

JFK’s trip raised no eyebrows at the time. He wasn’t a three-letter celebrity yet, just a senator from Massachusetts. The election, which he would win by the narrowest of margins, wasn’t for another nine months. The Democratic National Convention wasn’t even for another five.

And Kennedy’s brother-in-law was in the Rat Pack. (Peter Lawford was married to JFK’s younger sister, Patricia, from 1954 to 1966.)

The mafia was not only happy to help satisfy the rising political star’s libido, it had someone specific in mind. Judith Campbell, a 26-year-old divorcée, was Sinatra’s had enjoyed a fling with Sinatra in 1959, and the two remained friends after it ended.

Ol’ Blue Eyes was asked to invite her along for the fun. He introduced them. Sparks flew.

“Judith was put on him to keep him corralled,” Walters told the R-J. “We wanted control. Remember, we were trying to operate legally. We were very worried about the Kennedys. We monitored all of his calls. We wanted to know who he was connected with.”

JFK Blown Away

Their lunch date the following day led to a month of calls from the campaign trail. They consummated their affair at New York’s Plaza Hotel on March 7. It was the night before the New Hampshire primary.

When Kennedy became president, the Sands got paid a visit from members of his administration.

“They wanted to know if we had any film, any pictures and who Kennedy was with,” Walters told the R-J. “At that time, we had Judith in hiding.”

The affair steamed forward for two more years. (Campbell even claims it carried on in the White House!) Both Kennedy and the mafia benefited from the arrangement, since Campbell was a natural go-between.

“I feel like I was set up to be the courier,” Campbell wrote in her 1977 memoir. “I was a perfect choice because I could come and go without notice, and if noticed, no one would’ve believed it anyway.”

Cupid’s Messenger

Her first assignment was delivering a bag filled with money to Giancana, someone else Sinatra had previously introduced her to.

Campbell believed the money was a payoff for Giancana’s help tipping the West Virginia primary in Kennedy’s favor. And she said she believed that a mess of letters Kennedy asked her to deliver to Chicago later in 1960 concerned his attempts to recruit the mob to help him assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

“I was 26 and in love,” Campbell told Vanity Fair in 1997. “Was I supposed to have more judgment than the president of the United States?”

The final act in their dramatic affair was one Campbell kept secret until she was dying of breast cancer.

In December 1962, Campbell said, she tried breaking it off.

“I said I wouldn’t see him anymore, it was too painful,” she told Vanity Fair. “But we were intimate that one last time, in the White House. I still loved him with all my heart. I don’t know if God was punishing me … but I realize I am pregnant.”

A stunned silence consumed the telephone call after she broke the whopper to the President of the United States.

“His first remark was — and he knew instantly he said the wrong thing — ‘What are you going to do?’” Campbell told Vanity Fair. “Then he corrected himself and said, ‘I’m sorry. What are we going to do?’ He added, ‘Do you want to keep the baby?’ I was crying.

“I said, ‘Jack, you know I can’t keep this child. The FBI is all over us, and has been since they first knocked on my door in I960.’ He was very sweet. He said, ‘Well, I want you to know it’s an option if you want to keep the baby. We can arrange it.’”

She decided not to. But it was a decade before Roe v. Wade, so she asked Giancana to arrange the illegal abortion at Chicago’s Grant Hospital.

Campbell’s story is often relegated to the JFK conspiracy file, along with untold unproven theories about his assassination by people other than Lee Harvey Oswald.

But after Campbell died in September 1999, and the New York Times’ obituary reported that former aides of JFK denied her affair with JFK, the paper of record subsequently ran a correction to its obituary.

That correction read that its obit “should also have reflected what is now the view of a number of respected historians and authors, that the affair did in fact take place. The evidence cited by various authorities in recent years has included White House phone logs and memos from J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Lost Vegas” is an occasional Casino.org series spotlighting Las Vegas’ forgotten history. Click here to read other entries in the series. Think you know a good Vegas story lost to history? Email corey@casino.org.